Millions of toxic wind turbine blades have already been dumped in landfill, with millions more to follow. The wind industry is filled with shysters of all shapes and sizes, and has managed to spawn a peculiar a sub-species that spends their days telling everyone about their wonderful plans to recycle turbine blades, and their nights dumping them illegally, all over the countryside.
One such operation, known as Global Fiberglass Solutions has been doing just that for more than 7 years. Now the State of Iowa has worked out that it’s been taken for a ride, suing the operator for dumping 1,300, 16 ton blades in various locations across the State.
State sues company accused of dumping wind-turbine blades
Iowa Capital Dispatch
Clark Kauffman
26 September 2024
The state of Iowa is suing a Washington-state company and its executives for allegedly dumping tons of old wind-turbine blades around Iowa, in violation of the state’s solid-waste laws.
The lawsuit alleges that over the past seven years, Global Fiberglass Solutions has failed to properly dispose of decommissioned wind-turbine blades and stockpiled them at multiple locations across Iowa.
These blades were allegedly dumped in the city of Newton
The lawsuit, filed in Iowa District Court for Jasper County, seeks payment of civil penalties and a court injunction to prevent any additional violations of the state’s solid-waste laws.
Global Fiberglass Solutions and its CEO, Donald Lilly, are named as defendants in the case, as is Ronald Albrecht, one of Global’s corporate officers. The defendants could not be reached for comment.
The lawsuit claims that General Electric, which provides parts and equipment for wind turbines, and MidAmerican Energy, which owns wind turbines in Iowa, each hired Global in 2017 to recycle their decommissioned wind-turbine blades.
MidAmerican and General Electric paid Global “millions of dollars,” the lawsuit alleges, to cut up, transport, and recycle the blades. Typically, such blades are about 170 feet long and weigh roughly 16 tons.
Rather than recycle the blades, the lawsuit claims Global instead dumped roughly 1,300 of them at four locations around the state: Newton, Atlantic, and a site in Ellsworth that was used to store blades that were originally dumped in Fort Dodge.
At one time, the lawsuit alleges, there were about 868 blades stored at the Newton site, which was a parking lot for the former Maytag factory. In Ellsworth, Global allegedly dumped 400 blades in a field, directly on the ground. In Atlantic, 22 blades were dumped in a field, directly on the ground, according to the lawsuit.
In 2018, according to the lawsuit, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources began fielding complaints about the Newton site. In 2020, the department sent Global a “notice of violation” related to the sites in Fort Dodge and Newton, indicating the blades were not being recycled as claimed and had simply been discarded. Later that year, a similar notice was issued regarding the Ellsworth site.
In December 2020, the lawsuit alleges, Global agreed to a consent order obligating the company to “take a number of concrete steps to purchase, install, and commence using recycling equipment” to process a certain percentage of the blades according to a series of deadlines.
The company was also required to post a $2 million surety bond to defray state expenses should the DNR be forced to remove and dispose of the blades because of Global’s lack of compliance with the consent order.
The DNR then agreed to extend the deadline for posting the bond until April 1, 2021.
Global never posted the bond, according to the lawsuit, and so the DNR ordered Global to stop accumulating wind-turbine blades in Iowa and to remove all of the blades scattered at the disposal sites. Global didn’t comply with that order and in July 2021 the matter was referred to the Iowa attorney general’s office for legal action.
The state’s lawsuit against Global was filed this week, three years after that referral. It seeks a civil penalty of up to $5,000 per day for each day the company was out of compliance with Iowa’s solid-waste laws.
State records indicate MidAmerican has removed and properly disposed of the blades once located at the Ellsworth site, while General Electric has removed the blades from Atlantic and Newton – a task that was completed in June of this year.
Global and its executives “dumped and abandoned 1,300 decommissioned wind-turbine blades in stockpiles across the state,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said in a press release. “We are taking action to hold them accountable.” Iowa Capital Dispatch
There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue.
I’m quoting from The Chris Hedges Report on Substack. I have no expertise or particular knowledge of how this works, but I do know that when it comes to anything climate change and the various associated conferences that can involved tens of thousands of people, it is much the same. Reporters are flown in, put up at luxury hotels, attend banquets and given press releases that contain information that is mostly untrue.
Then there are those who attempt to find out what is really going on. When it comes to climate change issues, we are mostly just ignored and there is no war zone as such. But I’m sorry for the eleven journalists killed in Lebanon over the last few weeks, I would think at least some of them were attempting to report the fact. I find there are always a few, across generations, across cultures who will put themselves in harms way because they need to speak truth to power. It is overwhelming.
According to Hedges:
Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.
Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.
The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.
“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel’s onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”
The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media is unlike anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.
Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.
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I have no way of verifying any of the information provided in this article, and I have no way of verifying the photograph featured at the top of this post and credited to Mohammed Al-Zaatari.
‘…like the worms around a corpse they wriggle in skinny, and they wriggle out fat….’ To help support this channel & get exclusive videos every week sign up to Neil Oliver on Patreon.com
Transcript
Greetings one and all, great to have you with me for another look at what’s happening in the world around us. Hope you enjoy listening to me vent spleen to the same extent that I enjoy venting it. But before I launch into my weekly monologue, I just want to give you the heads up about my patreon.com site. If you go there, find me, join up and part with a little bit of cash, you’ll be supporting this channel in an irreplaceably practical way. It costs about as much as one cup of coffee a month to show that support, but it makes all the difference here. And in return, you get early access to all menu content and exclusive access to a Q&A, a question and answer session every week. It’s great, we enjoy it, the patreon family. So join, join up, stir yourself into the mix and make it better by being there. Okay, that’s the advert over, it’s now time for the rant.
The oddness of the people in charge, I mean beyond anything else, they’re just an odd squad. The heads of state, the high-profile people are just looking increasingly peculiar, sometimes even physically, but certainly kind of morally and ideologically. But anyway, what I detect then more and more is the distance between us and those who have declared themselves in power over us.
Obviously, this is a great deal to do with the antics of the elected, but perhaps more particularly the unelected and thereby unaccountable. Listen to this guy addressing some or other forum of the World Economic Forum:
“We are broadly speaking agreed that we need to get on track towards a net zero climate safe and nature positive future. But we know this will not be easy, and we’re going to need to change behaviors of both individuals but also the way that our industries and corporations and also our governments work and practice. We’re going to need to do this through a mixture of carrots and hopefully, perhaps not so many sticks, and some kind of mix. And there’s a very active and live debate as to how we go about this, but we’re likely to see an increasing move towards more stick-like interventions into the future as things worsen if we’re not able to act.”
Net zero climate safe nature positive future, he says. We know this will not be easy, he says. We’re going to need to change behaviors, he says. We’re going to need to do this through a mixture of carrots and perhaps not so many sticks, but we’re likely to see an increasing move towards more stick-like interventions. How do you think so?
I mean seriously, who do these people, whoever they are, think they are? Cheerily choosing the use of sticks, metaphorical or not, in the face of billions of people who haven’t a reason to know him from Adam. Net zero, which is a suicide note for half the world, 4 billion people alive today. Nature positive? Can you be talking about the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems and environments to facilitate the strip mining of rare earth metals by child slaves? Is that what he means?
A move towards an increase in the amount of mining of 1,000, 2,000% who knows to meet demand for gold, silver, copper, lithium, cobalt, lead and the rest. Does he mean the piggy backing on the coal, oil and gas use of nations like China to make the windmills, solar panels, the electric vehicles and the rest of the window dressing of the green agenda that’s more accurately described as the greed agenda? Is he talking about the windmill farms that require the sterilization of vast areas of ground, clearing them of all life so as to erect turbines that harvest thousands of birds that sit anyway on monolithic blocks of concrete, one of the most energy hungry and toxic products on the planet? Or when they whack them out at sea where their very presence in the water kills whales and other marine life? That kind of nature positive, that kind of green, is that he’s talking about?
Carrot and stick, he says, with an increasing move towards more stick-like interventions. What sort of sticks exactly, we man? What are you talking about? Higher taxes maybe? The taking away of necessities of life? Or actual sticks, truncheons and batons for the uncooperative? What kind of stick?
So I ask again, who is this joker? Where do people like this, nobodies and non-entities like this, get the idea that while unelected and unaccountable, they could and should and would take unilateral decisions guaranteeing the immiseration of people like you and me? Why do they imagine for even a nanosecond that they’re somehow imbued with the right and the power to make harder, smaller, darker, colder and hungrier the lives of billions of people?
From Davos and the WEF to the frauds of Downing Street in London in Britain, the refrain is the same. Keir Starmer wallows in freebies like the rest of his cabinet lackeys while his Chancellor Rachel Reeves dots the i’s and crosses the t’s on a budget set to pick the pockets of everyone else, pensioners and plebs alike. A population already crushed beneath the greatest tax burden since World War II, already extorted for some of the most expensive and uneconomic energy in the world.
But do you know what really sticks in my craw, really sticks in my throat, what fills me to the brim with righteous anger? It’s the glaring certainty that the diminished lives they have in mind for their fellow human beings are absolutely not the lives they have in mind for themselves. What’s utterly lacking in all of this, every step of the way by those WEF, WHO, UN types is an iota of sincerity. And by sincerity, I mean that if these people sincerely believed in the necessity, far less the virtuousness of the kind of diminished, limited, lesser lives they have in mind for us, if they had so much as an ounce of sincerity in their self-righteous, narcissistic heads, then they would already be living those lives themselves as an example to the rest of us.
It’s the presumption of right, of being right, of having the right to disregard the hopes and dreams, even just the relative normality of the lives of others that makes me wonder if I’ve walked by accident through a door into a parallel universe where the very idea of natural law is entirely absent.
I keep replaying in my head statements by the likes of John Kerry, a so-called climate czar for Joe Biden, telling that meeting of the World Economic Forum that free speech is a massive obstacle to the ability to govern. Or Hillary Clinton demanding more censorship on the Internet. Or Barack Obama calling for likewise. Or Bill Gates, international peddler of gene therapies and other experimental, unsafe, ineffective if not demonstrably lethal medical interventions. Bill Gates, whose principal residence is a palace the size of a city block. Bill Gates, who wishes there were fewer people on the planet while simultaneously gushing about his fleet of private jets and other aircraft being his guilty pleasure. Bill Gates, friend of international pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
They’re everywhere, these parasite philanthropists. Al Gore had a net worth of around a million bucks when he ran and fell as Democrat presidential candidate in 2000, but he’s worth 300 million bucks now after decades of spouting nonsense about climate change from his beachfront property among other addresses. So no fear of sea level rises there, apparently. Remember his images of starving polar bears and the rest of the doom-laden prophecy that 20-odd years later still hasn’t happened? As in none of it.
They’re ten a penny, these self-seeking, self-aggrandizing fraudsters and con artists predicting the imminent end of the world while the cash registers ring loud, clear and endlessly in the background. Whatever delusions these people are laboring under, a consequence presumably of too long exposure to wealth and power combined, they have evidently reached and long since passed the point of reason.
I say they’re certifiably mad, these characters. That we’re dealing with a version of insanity, albeit disguised in expensive clothes, domiciled in beachfront palaces in Martha’s Vineyard and similar, aided and abetted by bought and paid for media and bought and paid for politicians. A kind of madness that has assumed the right to rule as though granted by God himself.
All of them, these prognosticators of perdition for us, have at least one thing in common. Like the worms around a corpse, they wriggle in skinny and they wriggle out fat. Every one of them bloated, enriched by their dishonesty to the tune of tens and hundreds of millions of pounds and dollars and euros. These people will never downsize to modest homes. They’ll never know the penetrating cold of a northern winter, the lethal heat of an equatorial summer. They’ll never have their horizons limited to a 15-minute walk from their front doors. They’ll never have to eat what others prescribe for them, and they’ll never have to keep their mouth shut out of fear of censure or worse.
They’re full-time hypocrites, saying one thing and doing another. Their words are invested with no heartfelt meaning, at best political expediency. They mean to force us to do as they say with sticks while themselves indulging lives unimaginable even to the emperors of old. They’re charlatans, liars, snake oil salesmen. They can never be trusted except to do and say whatever makes their lives more and our lives less.
For hundreds of thousands of innocents in Ukraine, life has been rendered non-existent by those who, in pursuit of yet more wealth, the furtherance of their ideologies and ambitions, peddle war as the most profitable racket in town. More souls are burned alive in the blighted holy land, or vaporized or rendered into bloody chunks for the enrichment of the international arms industry, for the material gain of more of the same people.
It’s like Ted Hughes’s poem of the same name. They’re determined to dominate, always to dominate. There’s nothing especially clever about a hawk. It’s just a creature that has found its niche, an ecosystem of likely prey in which to thrive. And we have permitted the ecosystem for these psychopathic parasites. We have a world patrolled by predators that desire only to perpetuate their own existence and their own kind. To quote: “I use no arguments, assert my right. The sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.”
And then here’s the thing, here’s the thing behind it all but increasingly unavoidably apparent. As I said at the top, the downright oddness, the peculiarity of these people. I won’t name names, but have a look around at the, shall we say, nationally and internationally prominent class and go in search there of any that appear to you to lead lives, to have lifestyles, to have dreams and aspirations, even tastes and preferences that you can identify with or recognize for even a second.
Ask yourself, as I increasingly do, who are these people? Where on Earth do they come from? And what on Earth did we ever do to deserve them? Put simply, they are not like us. They do not like us. In fact, they regard us with contempt. The distance between us and them has long since grown too wide ever to be bridged. There are simply two tribes now: one very small and very odd, and one very large indeed. If it’s finally about dog eat dog, my money is always on the great big hungry dog.
This video will be archived in WUWT Climate TV, a collection of over six hundred videos, featuring new interviews and analysis, and covering dozens of media sources discussing, debating and analyzing the latest in climate science, climate politics, and energy policy, including topics concerning temperature, sea level, polar bears, ocean acidification, extreme weather, censorship, wild fires, and more.
H/T philincalifornia
This show will be archived in WUWT Climate TV, a collection of over six hundred videos, featuring new interviews and analysis, and covering dozens of media sources discussing, debating and analyzing the latest in climate science, climate politics, and energy policy, including topics concerning temperature, sea level, polar bears, ocean acidification, extreme weather, censorship, wild fires, and more.
For well over two decades, the linked causes of climate alarmism and energy transition have provided their adherents with a powerful upper hand in American politics. For that matter, supporters of those causes have had just as strong, if not a stronger upper hand in the politics of all the countries with advanced economies, whether in the EU, or Canada, Australia, and others. Here in the U.S., for all this time, almost no politician — even those claiming to advocate generally for smaller government or less regulation — has been willing to push back directly against assertions of “climate crisis,” or against demands for reducing “carbon emissions” or for achieving a “net zero” energy economy via government coercion and massive subsidies. Most Republicans seeking office have been cowed into deflecting and deferring on these issues, if indeed they have not openly gone along with the left’s energy program.
I have long said that this situation can’t last. The reason is that the proposed energy transition is infeasible and can’t possibly work; and the effort to achieve the impossible via government mandates and subsidies would inevitably drive up costs and otherwise impact voters directly in ways they would see. At some point the voters would react. But when would that occur?
You may not have noticed, but in the current election, push-back against insane energy transition policies has suddenly become a winning political issue. For the first time, Republicans are explicitly using the now patent consequences of the energy transition as a key strategy to win close races, including the presidency.
Consider the issue of electric vehicle mandates. There is no question about where Kamala Harris stands on this issue right now as a matter of official government action in which she has been personally involved. The Biden-Harris administration worked on developing a form of mandates for EVs from the day those two took office, as part of the administration’s “all of government” approach to, supposedly, controlling climate change through regulations. Two major rules were initiated on the subject, and gradually crept their way through the regulatory labyrinth. After years of process, the two rules became final on, respectively, April 18 and June 7, 2024. This is not ancient history, but rather something that occurred just over four months ago, and was big news at the time. The two Rules are in effect right now. There is no pretending this does not exist, or that it is part of some long-ago talking points of prior Harris campaigns that she has since moved on from. I covered these two rules in a post on June 8 titled “The Latest On The Federal War Against Internal Combustion Vehicles.”
Although the Rules are couched in terms of emissions and fuel economy standards, it is obvious on their face that the standards are set in a way that most internal combustion engine cars cannot meet them, thus forcing a transition to mostly EVs by the early 2030s. My June 8 post cited a March 25 analysis from Atlas EV Hub, which concluded that the EPA Rule alone could force EVs to be as much as 69% of new vehicle sales by 2032:
The regulation is set to bring significant changes to the auto industry, potentially putting the United States on the glide path to full electrification. . . . Under this final rule, battery electric and plug-in hybrid electric light-duty vehicles could make up 32 percent of all new vehicle sales in model year 2027, increasing to 69 percent by model year 2032.
Some time in late September or early October, the Trump campaign, sensing political advantage, began running an ad in Michigan explicitly stating that Harris is seeking to ban gasoline-powered cars. Video of the ad can be seen at this link. Here are the first few sentences of text:
Auto workers. Kamala Harris wants to end all gas powered cars. Crazy but true. Harris’s push requiring electric only is failing big and Michigan auto workers are paying the price. Massive layoffs already started. You could be next. President Trump’s committed to protecting America’s auto workers.
On October 4, reported by the New York Post here, Harris responded at a campaign rally in Flint, Michigan, with a statement saying:
“Michigan, let us be clear: Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive.”
Of course Harris did not give anyone a chance to press her on the issue, or to ask her to explain how the two new Rules do not constitute an attempt to tell people “what kind of car they can drive.”
“In March, the EPA announced new emissions standards that had been drafted in close consultation with Michigan’s auto industry and Michigan’s auto workers. After responding to legitimate concerns from our auto manufacturers, the administration developed standards that were tough and aggressive, but also achievable — and earned the support of the auto industry and the UAW.”
The statement goes on and on from there in carefully calculated dissembling. It’s fun to watch her squirm.
A very similar dynamic has been unfolding in Pennsylvania, where Democratic Senate candidate Bob Casey is now pretending that he has been a big supporter of fracking all along.
We are in the early days of this. Harris, Slotkin, Casey, et al., may still very well win their races. But however things come out this year, I predict that two and four years from now the needle will have swung further in the direction of energy sanity. Sooner or later, support for expensive and unworkable energy will become politically toxic. It can’t happen soon enough.
